JR: Welcome to the blog, H. L. I have interviewed you several years ago, but could you tell us about how you came to Christ and how you got interested in writing?
HW: I had attended church from the time I was about 5 years old and believed that what I heard about Jesus from the Bible was true. I told myself that someday I was going to commit my life to Christ. Some day kept being put off until, as a teenager, I met a young lady who challenged me regarding my spiritual condition. She emphasized that my commitment to Jesus was not something to put off, because we do not know how long we have here on planet earth. She gave me the push I needed, and at age 18, I committed my life to Christ. Two years later, I committed my life to that young woman, and we’ve been married now for 56 years.
About writing—I’ve always been writing something, mostly as a hobby—short stories, essays, poetry. When I became a research scientist, I wrote scientific articles, papers, books, and reports that were published in the scientific literature. But I didn’t start writing fiction until after I retired. A fun project that my kids urged me to do—writing down my childhood stories that I had told to them—was so fun that I tried my hand with a novel. When it won a book contract, I was hooked.
On a more serious note, writing fiction is a way to convey spiritual truths that people won’t always listen to when we talk with them. But as C.S. Lewis said, one can smuggle a lot of God’s word and His ways into a story and people will read it.
JR: If I remember correctly from a previous interview, you used to be a military meteorologist. For those who hadn't read it (and to refresh my aging memory), how does that differ from the finely dressed ladies and gentlemen on the local news or the Weather Channel? Should we have more respect for their predictions? And are you a fan of any particular weather personality?
HW: Yes, I was a meteorologist in the military and then served in that capacity for nearly 13 years at a national lab. On a Strategic Air Command base as a new second lieutenant in a detachment that was short on officers, I had to fill two captain’s slots. Besides being the Chief Forecaster, I was the Wing Weather Officer, which meant that each morning I gave personal weather briefings to the staff of the Bomb Wing Commander, the Missile Wing Commander, the Helicopter Squadron, the Fighter/Interceptor Squadron, and if requested to the Base Commander. Since I was considered a staff member of both Wing Commanders, I gave them briefings in person while standing in front of a 10-foot screen with an old-fashioned pointer in hand and about 30 stern-looking, high-ranking officers scrutinizing everything I said. The other briefings were my only televised briefings. We used closed-circuit TV and the picture was in black and white.
As you can see, this was not as glamorous as a modern TV weather woman’s briefings. In fact, it could become downright intimidating, because my audience could ask me questions—questions like, “Can I complete all of my planned activities without weather interfering, yes or no?” Forecasts were not given in probabilities of precipitation or probabilities of anything else. Answers were always binary, either yes or no. And if my forecast busted, I had to face the commander the next day and convince him my next forecast was as right as rain … or snow or tornadoes, or whatever. I grew a thick skin and developed excellent forecasting skills, because it was a matter of survival. ☺
I do have a favorite TV forecaster, Shannon O'Donnell. She’s a meteorologist for the local Seattle ABC station. Shannon has the unique capability of explaining the forecast in a way that the general public gets the information they need to know from her forecasts.
JR: Looking at your Amazon page, I see several series. I have read some from three of them (Pure Genius, Against All Enemies, and Witness Protection), but I noticed the Riven Republic trilogy and others like Slanted, Virtuality, and The Janus Journals. Could you introduce each series/stand alone, a brief description, and what you enjoyed about writing that series/story?
HW: Let’s start with the Riven Republic Series. It is based on the premise that American Constitutionalists and the Radical Left have no common ground in their ideologies and so we face an inevitable break up of the nation, a modern-day version of a civil war. I took the state of Oregon as a microcosm of the United States and followed the conflict through the lives of Oregonians on both sides of the political issues. Rather than a nationwide war, I portrayed a fragmentation of the nation along geopolitical boundaries. The fragmentation included a breakup of the military, and that created a real mess, especially as some areas formed militias to protect their families and homes.
The fun thing about this project was that I borrowed from all my books all the characters who lived in Oregon, and I reused them in the cast. It complicated the story, but my readers seemed to enjoy seeing heroes and heroines they knew.
Of my three stand-alone stories, two focused on issues in our country today. Based on scientific research, Slanted showed precisely how search engines influence people’s thinking without them realizing it. In the story, the company running the world’s largest search engine attempts to influence a presidential election, and when a researcher starts to expose the plot, the CEO hires a team to kill him, to kill the eight-year-old girl for which he is a guardian, and a young woman who tries to help the young girl.
Virtuality looks at virtual reality capabilities that are right on the horizon—capabilities that enable people to live their fantasies so realistically that they may never want to return to the real world. The existing technology needed to accomplish this is outlined in the story. The villains are the managers of a porn company who want to steal the technology and use it for nefarious purposes. This is happening to some extent now, and it will only get worse as the technology matures. I wanted to warn people what is coming so they could protect their children and themselves. This story won bronze in the Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards.
The Janus Journals is a dual timeline story where I tried to create a Cold War thriller but one that was set at the present time. It’s about a KGB deep-cover plant who came to the U.S. as a young man and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, he just never did his job and tried to live as a patriotic citizen in the country he had come to love. But when he’s discovered, many years later, both he and his daughter become the targets of the vindictive SVR. One timeline runs through the Reagan years. I really enjoyed watching Reagan’s speeches as I refreshed my memory with those things that might serve to change a dedicated KGB agent into a man who loves America. This story won silver in the Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards.
JR: When I contacted you about an interview, you mentioned you had some big news coming up. Is it a new series? Have you moved from suspense to writing sci fi or fantasy? Are you starting a metal band? Or have you decided to form an exploratory committee for a White House run?
HW: The big news we were keeping hidden for a while was that a group of Christian suspense writers, ten of us, are collaborating on a nine-novel collection of suspense novellas called Winter Deceptions. We have several best-selling, award-winning authors, including 2 or 3 Christy Award winners. Though still in prerelease, Winter Deceptions is already on several best seller lists on Amazon. Since the collection is about 1,300 pages long, it will only be released as an eBook. But the plan is, after sales dwindle, we will unpublish it, and each author will publish their own novella. Most of us are using our contribution as the prequel to a new series we are currently writing.
HW: We are so far removed from our founders’ vision for America that I believe there is nothing man can do to save our nation. We might gain a reprieve for the duration of a president’s term, but long-term we are headed for a godless future of depravity, lawlessness, and probably tyranny. But this is not unlike where the British Colonies were in the early 1700s after the first-generation immigrants died and their children and grandchildren took control. They lusted for money, land, and power. The religious fervor had largely died. They dealt treacherously with the native tribes. What saved our nation then and made it ready to govern itself and take its place among the nations of the world was a movement of God across this land, the first Great Awakening.
From the preaching of Edwards, Whitefield, Brainerd, and others, hearts and minds were changed. The Gospel spanned cultural and racial boundaries, reaching African Americans and Native Americans. Our nation was unified as never before, and the colonies became prepared for 1776 and all that followed.
In my Riven Republic Series, Zach Tanner, a radio talk show host, makes this statement during his radio broadcast in the first book of the series.
“In America’s history we have seen at least three and perhaps four Great Awakenings, if one counts the Jesus movement of the early ‘70s. These were movements of God that swept across the nation. One lasted nearly fifty years.
“In each awakening, personal revival led to political change within the culture because God was changing hearts. That led to a change in votes and subsequently in who got elected to state legislatures and to Congress.
“I am pleading with you to hold the line on biblical morality. Don’t cave in to the demands of the radical left. But most of all, pray with me for a movement of God across our nation as it struggles against itself and against God.”
Zach’s last paragraph sums up well what we need in America today, an awakening that changes the course of our nation.
JR: Thanks for your time. What's over the horizon? How can we keep up with your writing? Any web-sites or the like?
HW: I mentioned earlier the nine-story collection of suspense novellas, called Winter Deceptions, releasing August 11. My contribution, Against the Darkness, is the prequel to a three-book series of the same name which will release probably around the end of January 2023, after Winter Deceptions is unpublished.
Against the Darkness is the story of a brilliant young molecular virologist from Hong Kong, Dr. Meiling Chen. She is lured to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via an attractive postdoctoral fellowship where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their army, the PLA, plan to steal her findings and use them to create powerful biowarfare weapons. But Meiling conceals her most important findings and then destroys all the project data at Wuhan and flees to America with CCP agents in pursuit. If she survives, and finds Americans she can trust, Meiling plans to launch a team that will use her breakthrough findings to counter every biological warfare move by the Chinese.
Readers can find out more about Winter Deceptions—both the authors and their stories—on the project website: https://winterdeceptions.com/
I will be updating my website shortly to show the collection, to talk about my story, and to update readers on my progress in writing the Against the Darkness series. https://www.hlwegley.com
Thanks so much for hosting me, Jeffrey! Hopefully, I’ve whetted the appetites of suspense readers for some excellent Christian suspense stories.
Thanks for hosting me, Jeffrey!
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